In its annual global survey of CIOs, Gartner Executive Programs found Australian IT leaders face significant challenges compared to their global counterparts. [ + ]

The Department of Finance will soon tender for a project to build GovCMS, a centralised system for managing government websites, and has proposed to mandate the use of Drupal and the public cloud. [ + ]

Nearly 60% of Australian IT decision-makers expect to increase their data centre budgets by 5-10% in the next 12 months, with big data investments and virtualisation driving data centre growth. [ + ]

Telstra Global has signed an interconnection agreement with GTS that will give it access to points of presence in five Central and Eastern European countries. [ + ]

Organisations are increasingly hungry for their customers' personal data. However, the need to keep this data private raises a host of limitations and legal considerations. [ + ]

NBN Co plans to run fibre-to-the-premises in some apartment buildings where service providers like TPG have already deployed fibre-to-the-basement. [ + ]

Oracle has had a legal victory in its copyright infringement case against heavyweight Google, with a US appeals court deciding Oracle can copyright parts of Java. [ + ]

Australia's Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has appointed a world-renowned scientist to drive a spatial revolution in the business and government domains. [ + ]

Around 84% of enterprises had malware operating on their networks in 2013, and more than half had users downloading malware every two hours, Check Point research indicates. [ + ]

Government respondents to a Gartner CIO survey are feeling pressed to reduce IT budgets and are losing control of IT spending within their departments. [ + ]

By the end of 2014, there are forecast to be almost 3 billion internet users globally, with two-thirds of them from the developing world. [ + ]

Australian organisations must better inform customers about how personal data will be handled, and those that voluntarily report data breaches will be given preferential treatment, OAIC commissioners said. [ + ]

The cloud is sometimes touted as a money-saver, or at least a way to make management of expenditure easier - by turning CAPEX into OPEX. But there are hidden costs (like bandwidth) that should be taken into account when planning a cloud deployment. [ + ]

The Commission of Audit's phase one report argues that the government should have a digital-first policy for all interactions with government, and a cloud-first policy for ICT service procurement. [ + ]

A review of the fixed wireless and satellite portion of the NBN project has found that demand is up to three times greater than first planned, and recommended that NBN Co nearly double the number of base stations it is building. [ + ]